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Below is a look at the past morbidity (how many people became sick) of what were once very common infectious diseases, and the current morbidity in the U.S. There’s no smallpox and no polio, almost no measles, dramatically less chickenpox (also known as varicella) and H. influenza (that’s not flu, but a bacteria that can cause deadly meningitis.

This should drive home how effective the common childhood inoculations, made by Merck, Sanofi, GlaxoSmithKline, and Novartis, are. The pneumococcal vaccine, made by Pfizer, has resulted in dramatic drops in meningitis and pneumonia. When Bristol-Myers Squibb lost a patent case related to its hepatitis B drug the other week, investors shrugged, because children here are vaccinated against hepatitis B, so this isn’t a big market. The pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine has been failing us, because immunity against it fades. But there’s still a dramatic reduction in what was once a common disease.

Update: To be clear, these data represent data collected in 2007 on past incidence of these diseases. This was published here, in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The current data are annualized cases for 2010, per thelink to the original data that I had included above.

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It is a common misconception to confuse morbidity with mortality. Considering that Forbes is aimed on many non-scientific readers it might be good to clarify this. Definitely a very interesting statistic though.

@Sour Kraut – I’m not throwing stones here, putting up fists for a fight, pouring lemon juice, etc. But since you’re asking Matthew Herper to clarify… Thought you ought to know that he did, in fact, define (in a simple statement) what ‘morbidity’ meant within his second paragraph.

That chart is complete bunk. The numbers on left are from the early 1900′s, notice any date on chart. Check here for real numbers. . http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=768249 and here. http://business.financialpost.com/2014/04/16/lawrence-solomon-the-untold-story-of-measles/#__federated=1

This barely qualifies as interesting because the presentation is so skewed. What does “most recent reports” mean? Are these data for the past month? quarter? perhaps 2013? Or the most recently full year, 2012? Do tell. The “infographic” hasn’t done its job of conveying information. Aside from that, the “article” seems very much to be an advertisement, since it makes a great show of the pharmaceutical manufacturers’ names. The “love” of science and medicine asserted by the author isn’t apparent. Not at all.

Maybe I wasn’t clear enough, but I included a link to the original data which are quite clear we’re talking about 2010 cases of infection for most, most of which are zero. You can find the 2007 comparisons here, in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

This is a business website. I thought of mentioning which drug maker makes each individual vaccine, but decided that would eat up too many words. I was also going to go into a long discussion of the ineffectiveness of the pertussis vaccine, but decided to save it for another post.

I don’t really worry so much about pertussis in adults, but in children it can be rather dangerous. A lot of the more recent pertussis epidemics that have been occurring in the US have been due to the anti-vaccine lobby driving fears that vaccines will cause autism, leading to parents not having their children vaccinated. Since the reservoir of pertussis is adolescents and adults, its hard for these kids to avoid exposure and they get sick. And then you see waves of outbreaks. The Wakefield paper that started all of this non-sense has done tremendous harm to public health.

A major cause of the pertussis epidemics has been the waning efficacy of the vaccine (which was itself adopted as part of an anti-vaccine scare.) The newer vaccine is safer, but its efficacy wanes. We cannot blame this entirely on anti-vaxxers, even though the solution is to get more people to get the shot.

Or… Maybe you didn’t dig deep enough. The JAMA article cites as its methods, “We established prevaccine estimated annual averages and determined the number of (reported or estimated) cases, deaths, and hospitalizations (when available) for vaccine-preventable diseases. The prevaccine information was from a wide variety of historical reporting sources. We sought to identify the most comprehensive and credible of these sources. The historical average number of cases and deaths per year were taken from the number reported or estimated for a representative time period before vaccine licensure, or before widespread implementation of the vaccine-specific immunization program. ”

Do you understand that these diseases were RAPIDLY declining during the years before their vaccines came out? Do you understand that taking annual averages does not in ANY WAY indicate that the vaccines produced the results they are inferring? Correlation/Causation. You know the drill. If something is declining drastically already, an annual average in the earlier set of dates is not a legitimate basis for comparison to a year in the future.

In fact the cited study by the cited info on the CDC even made it quite clear that diphtheria for example was already significantly declining before the vaccine came out